This staggered the old lady.
"It is true—she does not understand you somehow; things seem to go the wrong way between times."
"Am I difficult to understand?" cried Hester. "I am only nineteen, and Catherine is sixty——"
"You are not quite so easy as A B C," said Mrs. Morgan, with a smile; "still I acknowledge that is one thing against her judgment. But you do not answer my question. Are you going to marry Harry Vernon?"
Hester, seated in the shelter of the curtain, invisible from outside, hardly visible within, looked out across the Common to the place where she had sat and pondered, and breathed a half-articulate "No."
"Then, Hester, you should tell him so," said the old lady. "You should not keep him hanging on. Show a little respect, my dear, to the man who has shown so much respect to you."
"Do you call that respect?" said Hester, and then she added, lowering her voice, "My mother wishes it. She thinks it would make her quite happy. She says that she would want nothing more."
"Ah!" said the old lady, "that means——" It is to be feared that she was going to say something not very respectful to Hester's mother, about whom, also, Catherine's prejudice told: but she checked herself in time. "That gives it another aspect," she said.
"Do you think it would be right to marry a man only because your mother wished it?" asked Hester, fixing her eyes on Mrs. Morgan's face.
"Sometimes," said the old lady, with a smile.